The Lonely City (22 page)

Added to this is the fact that AIDS stigmatised and made potentially lethal habits of sexual practice that had themselves been the source of intimacy and contact, antidotes to shame and isolation: the world that Wojnarowicz had documented so lovingly in
Close to the Knives.
Now the piers, which Nomi had also frequented, were increasingly being regarded as a site of danger, a place of contact in the sense not of touch but of infection and transmission. As the critic Bruce Benderson puts it in the essay ‘Towards the New Degeneracy’, in his collection
Sex and Isolation:

Then came the sledgehammer. AIDS simultaneously ruined my momentary escape from a decent curtailed identity and smashed the idea I had of promiscuity as an effortless expander of social consciousness. In the early eighties, before it was known exactly how AIDS spread – before safer sex – I was catapulted into a panicked loss of a principal means of self-expression and contact with
other humans. Now fucking casually meant more than a flouting of middle-class standards and a mockery of middle class hygiene. It meant illness and death – deterioration . . . Being part of the AIDS risk group made me feel unclean, expendable and marginalized.

Bearing in mind that both loneliness and rejection are stressful experiences, which have ravaging effects on the body, it’s shocking but not exactly surprising to discover that being subject to stigma has a powerful physical effect. In fact, psychologists at UCLA working on the relationship between stigma and AIDS discovered that HIV-positive people who suffer social rejection also experience accelerated HIV progression, both proceeding to full-blown AIDS faster and dying more quickly from AIDS-related infections that those who are not exposed to or who are protected from social rejection.

The mechanism here is broadly the same as in loneliness itself – a decline in immune function due to ongoing exposure to the stress of being isolated or rejected by the group. To make matters worse, the act of being closeted, of needing to conceal a stigmatized identity, is also stressful and isolating, and is likewise associated with a lower T cell count and consequently a greater susceptibility to AIDS-related infections. In short, being stigmatised is not just lonely, or humiliating, or shameful; it also kills.

Klaus Nomi died on 6 August 1983, a few weeks shy of his fortieth birthday. Six weeks earlier, on 20 June,
New York Magazine
had run its first AIDS cover story, ‘AIDS Anxiety’ by Michael Daly. It described the climate of the time, the kind of reactions
occurring across the city. A woman whose husband had been diagnosed, and whose child was being shunned at school. People who were asking if they should wear plastic gloves on the subway, or avoid public swimming pools. Among these anecdotes is a description of a police officer who ‘found herself frightened as she assisted a homosexual who had injured his head in a fall’.

She remembers, ‘At first, you feel itchy. The blood was the same color red, but I thought, “Oh, wow, I wonder if this guy’s got it.” Then I thought, “Oh well, I can’t let this guy bleed to death.” It was like a leper or something. You don’t treat people like that, but the fear is there. I found myself scrubbing with peroxide.’

This was not, to reiterate, a person with AIDS, but rather a person from a population that had become doubly suspect; a member, as Sontag put it, of ‘a community of pariahs’. In the same article another woman described the death of the male model Joe MacDonald: how he’d wasted away, how all the gay men she knew were thinking of going straight, how her model friends planned to avoid contact with brushes belonging to make-up artists they knew to be gay.

Fear is contagious, converting latent prejudice into something more dangerous. That same week, Andy Warhol recorded in his diary that at a photo shoot, ‘I used my own make up after reading the AIDS piece in
New York.’
He’d known Joe personally, though their acquaintance hadn’t helped to dispel the gathering frost, the outcast status. Back in February 1982, Andy had avoided Joe at a party, telling the Diary: ‘I didn’t want to be near him and talk
to him because he just had gay cancer’ – the past tense a painful reminder of the brief period in which no one even knew that the infection was permanent, the disease incurable.

Warhol’s diaries of the 1980s are full of scenes like this, manifestations of the poisonous currents of paranoia that were circling the city. Always a mirror of society’s concerns, his entries reflect back the ways in which homophobia and hypochondria had begun to intertwine.

11 May, 1982:

The New York Times
had a big article about gay cancer, and how they don’t know what to do with it. That it’s epidemic proportions and they say that these kids who have sex all the time have it in their semen and they’ve already had every kind of disease there is – hepatitis one, two, and three, and mononucleosis, and I’m worried that I could get it by drinking out of the same water glass or just being around these kids who go to the Baths.

24 June, 1984:

We went and watched the Gay Day parade . . . And there were guys in wheelchairs being pushed by their lovers. I’m serious! It looked like Halloween but without the costumes.

4 November 1985:

You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if they started putting gays in concentration camps. All the fags will have to get married so they won’t have to go away to camps. It’ll be like for a green card.

2 February, 1987:

Then they picked me up for the black-tie dinner at the Saint . . . And we were all afraid to eat anything because the Saint has the gay taint from when it used to be a gay disco. It was so dark there and they were serving the food on
black plates.

Lest it be forgotten, Warhol was himself a gay man, and in addition a major supporter of AIDS charities. But his personal reactions demonstrate the ways in which stigma spreads and gathers momentum, affecting even fellow members of a stigmatised population.

Warhol was particularly susceptible to this process because of his lifelong terror of sickness and disease, his obsession with contaminating bodies and the dangers they present. In the grips of this peculiarly paralysing hypochondria, he acted in ways that seem actively cruel, refusing to see or even contact acquaintances, friends and former lovers who had or might have AIDS. When he was told on the phone about the death of Mario Amaya, the critic who was with him when he was shot and who insisted that the doctors at the hospital restart his heart, he tried to make light of the news. And when his own former boyfriend Jon Gould died of AIDS-related pneumonia in September 1986, he absolutely refused to discuss the subject in the Diary, announcing only that he would not comment on ‘the other news from L.A.’

In some ways his reaction is unique, a product of a fear of death so intense that he didn’t attend his own mother’s funeral or tell even his closest friends that she had died, saying instead
whenever he was asked about her that she was shopping in Bloomingdale’s. But it also encapsulates the way that stigma functions to isolate and separate, especially when death comes out of the dark and begins to serve its black plates.

*

Klaus Nomi was the first famous person to die of AIDS, but within a handful of years the disease was running like wildfire through the community he came from: the close-knit world of downtown New York, composed of artists, composers, writers, performers, musicians. As the writer and activist Sarah Schulman puts it in
Gentrification of the Mind,
her trenchant history of AIDS and its consequences, the disease, at least in the early years, disproportionately affected ‘risk-taking individuals living in oppositional subcultures, creating new ideas about sexuality, art and social justice’. Many were queer or otherwise antagonistic to the family values promoted by conservative politicians, and though their work varies wildly, much of it, even before the AIDS crisis, existed in resistance to the isolation that comes from being marginalised or legislated against, made to feel not just different but unwanted and irrelevant.

One of these people was the photographer Peter Hujar, who was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS on 3 January 1987. Hujar was an old acquaintance of Warhol’s, and had appeared in several of his Screen Tests, as well as his film
Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys.
He was an exceptionally talented photographer in his own right. Working always in black and white, and moving fluidly between
landscapes, portraits, nudes, animals and ruins, his images possess a graveness, a formal perfection that is very rarely attained.

As such, he was much in demand for fashion and studio work. He was friends with the
Vogue
editor Diana Vreeland, and his subjects included William Burroughs and Susan Sontag, the famous portrait of her lying on a couch in a ribbed sweater, her hands behind her head. He was also responsible for the picture of the Warhol Superstar Candy Darling on her deathbed, surrounded by white roses, later the cover of Antony and the Johnsons’ second album,
I Am a Bird Now.

Hujar’s own work patrols something of the same milieu as that of another friend, Diane Arbus. Both were drawn to drag queens and street people, to those whose bodies and experiences were outside the norm. But while Arbus’s work is sometimes alienating and estranging, Hujar looked at his subjects with the eye of an equal, a fellow citizen. His gaze is just as steady, but it has a deeper capacity for contact – the tenderness of an insider, rather than the chilliness of a voyeur.

Despite his talent, Hujar was perpetually indigent, living on the very edge of destitution in his loft on Second Avenue, above what is now the Village East cinema, where I sometimes went to while away Saturday afternoons. And despite his capacity for intimacy, his exceptional gifts at both listening and speaking, let alone his promiscuous genius for sex, he was also profoundly isolated, separate from the people around him. He’d flared up at almost every magazine editor and gallerist in the city and fought with most if not all of his wide and varied circle of friends, exploding into paroxysms of terrifying anger. According to
Stephen Koch, a close friend and later Hujar’s executor, ‘Peter was probably the loneliest person I’ve ever met. He lived in isolation, but it was a highly populated isolation. There was a circle drawn around him that no one crossed.’

If anyone did manage to make it inside that circle, it was David Wojnarowicz. Hujar was one of the most important people in David’s world: first as a lover, and then as best friend, surrogate father, surrogate brother, soulmate, mentor and muse. They’d met in a bar on Second Avenue back in the winter of 1980, or perhaps early in 1981. The sexual aspect of their relationship hadn’t lasted long, but the intensity of their connection never slackened, though Hujar was almost twenty years older. Like David, he’d had an abusive childhood in New Jersey, and like David he carried around a reservoir of bitterness and rage.

Somehow, they got through each other’s defences (Stephen Koch again: ‘David became part of the circle. He was in it’). It was because of Hujar’s interest and belief that David started to take himself seriously as an artist. Hujar persuaded him to take up painting, insisting too that he stop dabbling with heroin. His protection and love helped David step aside at least a little from the burdens of his childhood.

Though they took multiple portraits of each other, the only image I’ve ever seen of them together is by Nan Goldin, their mutual friend. They’re in the corner of a dark room, standing side by side, their shirts flaring white in the flash. David is smiling, his eyes closed behind big glasses, like a happy, gawky kid. Peter is smiling too, his head tilted conspiratorially. They look at ease, these two men who often weren’t.

In September 1987, Hujar went as he often did to a restaurant on 12th Street, right next to his apartment. While he was eating, the owner came over and asked if he was ready to pay. Sure, Peter said, but why? Bruno held out a paper bag, saying: ‘You know why . . . just put your money in here.’ A minute later he brought the change back in another paper bag, which he tossed on Peter’s table.

This story comes from
Close to the Knives,
which in addition to documenting the magical pre-AIDS world of the piers records the gathering horror of the epidemic as it began to annihilate David’s world. When he heard what had happened to Hujar, his first impulse was to go to the restaurant and pour ten gallons of cow blood over the grill. Instead, he went in at lunchtime, when the place was packed, and screamed at Bruno, demanding an explanation, until ‘every knife and fork in the place stopped moving. But even that wasn’t enough to erase this rage.’

It wasn’t just one intolerant restaurant owner that was making him feel almost insane with fury. It was the way the sick were being dehumanised in the eyes of others, reduced to infectious bodies against which people sought to protect themselves. It was the politicians getting up bills to quarantine the HIV positive in camps, and the newspaper columnists suggesting people be tattooed with their infection status. It was the massive surge in homophobic attacks, ‘the rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in nightly news suburbs’. It was the governor of Texas saying, ‘If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers,’ and the mayor of New York running to a sink to wash his hands after distributing cookies to children who had AIDS. It was your best friend dying
in front of your eyes, without a cure in sight, taking typhoid shots made from human shit prescribed by a quack on Long Island to try and shock his failing immune system into life.

Peter was terrified by the prospect of dying, and his terror made him furious, livid at everyone and everything. After his diagnosis, David saw him almost every day, visiting him at the loft or in hospital rooms high above the city. He went with him on quixotic, exhausting errands to find faith healers and doctors who promised miracle cures. He was there when Peter was ill, and he was there at the Cabrini Medical Center when Peter died on 26 November 1987, at the age of fifty-three, only nine months after he’d received his diagnosis.